What it does
A phone camera, turned into a document scanner.
Everything this document scanner does runs inside this tab, on this device. It needs no account, no subscription, and no connection once the page has loaded.
Finds the page
The document scanner outlines the sheet live as you move the camera, and the corners can be dragged if the outline picks the wrong edge.
Straightens the perspective
A page photographed at an angle comes back rectangular, as though it had gone through a flatbed document scanner rather than been held in one hand.
Cleans the lighting
Shadows, a warm desk lamp and the grey of a phone photo are evened out, so the paper reads white and the ink reads black.
Reads the text
The document scanner runs OCR over every page, so the PDF you get is one you can search inside and select text from rather than a picture of a document. Text recognition reads English today, and the searchable layer carries Latin script only — a page in another script still scans cleanly, but its text cannot be searched yet.
Builds a multi-page PDF
Keep photographing; the document scanner collects the pages in a tray you can reorder, rotate or drop from before the PDF is written.
Keeps it on the device
The document scanner keeps finished scans in this browser’s own storage. They are yours to export, and there is no server holding a copy.
Why a browser
Why use a document scanner in the browser?
A flatbed document scanner sits on one desk; the camera on your phone goes wherever the paperwork does. Most phone document scanner apps want an install, an account, and an upload of every page to their servers before you get your PDF back. This document scanner is a web page: open it, photograph the page, save the PDF. Nothing to install, and the pages never leave the device.
If all you need is a PDF of something on paper, the guide to scan to PDF in your browser walks through it step by step, from a single receipt to a multi-page contract.
How it works
Every step of the document scanner happens on your own machine.
At the heart of the document scanner is a core written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly — 182 KB over the wire, gzipped. It runs in a background worker inside the tab, which is why dragging the brightness slider on a 12-megapixel photo does not stutter.
Find the page
The sheet is outlined live in the viewfinder as you move. If the outline is wrong, drag any of the four corners onto the right ones.
Straighten it
The quadrilateral you photographed is mapped back to a rectangle, sized from the page's near edge so none of the sharp detail is thrown away.
Clean it up
Photo, Enhance, or Black & white, with brightness and rotation. Enhance stretches the page back to white paper and black ink without crushing either.
Read it
On-device text recognition puts an invisible layer behind the page image, so the PDF is searchable and selectable while still looking like the scan.
Build the PDF
Add, reorder and delete pages with no limit. Choose A4, Letter, Legal or the scan's own shape, and how hard to compress.
Keep it, or don't
Finished documents stay in this browser, and the document scanner can search across every scan you have made — by the words recognition read inside them.
A free, open source document scanner — every feature, no account, no watermark, no limit.
Other places it runs
Also being built for iPhone, iPad and Android.
The document scanner above runs in any modern browser, including the one on your phone. That is the whole product today. The same Rust core is also being built into native apps, so the camera, the file picker and offline storage come from the platform rather than from a browser tab — the identical scanning code, compiled for the phone.
- Ready In your browser Every feature, on any device. Add the document scanner to your home screen and it opens like an app and works offline.
- In progress Android There is no Android download at the moment. The scanner above works on your phone, with nothing to install.
- In progress iPhone & iPad Same engine, running on both and laid out for the iPad. Not yet signed for distribution, so there is nothing to download.
Privacy
The only document scanner where you can check the privacy claim yourself.
Every document scanner app says your documents stay private. In a native app that is a promise you have no way to audit. Here it is something you can watch happen: open the developer tools, switch to the Network panel, and scan a page. After the app has loaded, nothing else is requested.
- The core cannot reach the network The Rust module that does the scanning has no HTTP client and no networking dependency compiled into it. There is no code path to a server.
- The text recognition is served from here Recognition engines normally fetch their model from a public CDN, which would tell a third party each time you scanned something. Every byte of it is served from this site instead.
- Cross-origin requests are refused, not merely avoided A service worker sits in front of every request the page makes and answers anything bound for another origin with a 403 — every method, not just reads.
- The document scanner needs no account There is nothing to register for, and no feature is behind a sign-in. An optional account exists — it carries credits across our apps — but your documents are stored by your browser, on your device, and never reach it.
- No ads, no trackers, no third-party analytics This page loads no third-party script and sets no cookie. It counts visits with our own self-hosted analytics, which never sees your scans; its test suite fails if a request ever leaves the origin.
Pricing
Free. The whole document scanner.
Every feature of this document scanner is free, with no page limit, no watermark, no trial and no account. There is no paid tier to be nudged towards, because everything runs on your own device and costs us nothing to run.
The document scanner apps this replaces charge a subscription to remove a watermark, cap the pages in a document, or hold your scans on their servers. This one does none of those things, and the source is public so you can check.
Questions
Before you scan anything.
- Is it free, including the text recognition (OCR)?
- Yes. Every feature on this page is free, including the text recognition, with no page limit, no watermark, no trial and no account. There is no paid tier.
- Does it put a watermark on the PDF?
- No. The PDF you export has no watermark, however many pages it has.
- Are my scans uploaded anywhere?
- No. Everything happens in this browser tab and nothing is uploaded. You can check it yourself: open the developer tools, switch to the Network panel, and scan a page. After the app has loaded, nothing else is requested.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes. Once the page has loaded it keeps working with no connection, including the text recognition — which is the part that usually needs a server.
- Is there an app for my phone?
- This page is one — add it to your home screen and it opens like any other, works offline, and uses the rear camera. Native iPhone, iPad and Android builds are also in progress over the same scanning code, but they are early. The browser version is the complete one.
- Do I need an account?
- No. Nothing here is behind a sign-in. There is an optional account that carries credits across our apps; your scans are never part of it.
- Which languages does the text recognition read?
- English today. The recognised text is written into the PDF as an invisible layer behind the page image. A page the English model cannot read — Chinese, Japanese or Korean, for instance — gets no searchable layer and no word count, and the scanner tells you so instead of filling the layer with guesses. The page image is unaffected.
- Where are my documents stored?
- In this browser, on this device. Not on a server, which also means they do not appear on your other devices, and clearing your browsing data clears them.
- Is it really open source?
- Yes — the whole thing, under MIT or Apache-2.0.